With the advent of the we-media era, increasing social networks are developed to be used by users. Generally, a piece of information posted by a user is processed and presented on an existing social network (such as Facebook or Twitter) in a format preset on the social network. During editing, the user hardly needs to describe how to present the information posted by the user. In addition, on a user interface provided in a system, a user can operate (such as post, forward, or comment) one piece of information by taking it as a whole, which is helpful for communication between users.
On a social network on which short text information is used as a basic communication unit, one piece of information is usually difficult to express a complex meaning because of a word count limit, and even one piece of quite long information needs to be written to express the complex meaning, which loses an advantage of a short text. In view of this, a resolving idea is provided in the prior art: In a network system, particularly in a social network system, on the premise that a user can still post one piece of information with a simple structure and use the piece of information as a basic unit for expressing a meaning, one piece of information with a new information structure is added to be used by the user as a basic unit for expressing a meaning. A manner of describing relative locations of multiple basic units when the multiple basic units for expressing meanings are being presented and referencing the multiple basic units is used for the piece of information with the new information structure to express the meaning by using a combination of these referenced basic units. When editing and posting the foregoing piece of new information, the user may choose to reference which basic units for the information, and set relative locations of the foregoing referenced basic units when the foregoing referenced basic units are being presented. The foregoing referenced basic unit may also be one piece of information with a new information structure. In this way, information expression efficiency of the system is improved.
The foregoing piece of information with the new information structure may be one piece of non-combination information, or may be one piece of combination information. A user posts one piece of combination information, and in view of some cases (for example, distorted understanding avoidance, copyright protection, and a business policy), the user may require that another user should abide by a corresponding rule when using the piece of combination information to constitute new combination information. For example, the piece of combination information sequentially includes five pieces of sub-information A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5, and the user expects that when using the foregoing five pieces of sub-information posted by the user, to constitute new combination information, another user needs to retain two pieces of sub-information in the five pieces of sub-information, for example, when the sub-information A2 is used to constitute new combination information, the sub-information A1 and the sub-information A2 also need to be added to the new combination information; or needs to keep relative locations of multiple pieces of sub-information unchanged, for example, when three pieces of sub-information A2, A4, and A5 are used to constitute new combination information, relative locations of the three pieces of sub-information are kept unchanged. The technical problem cannot be resolved in a solution in the prior art, and consequently, a user cannot protect lawful rights of an information publisher cannot be protected, and user experience is relatively poor.